Reimagining Our Inexperienced Adolescent Readers: From Struggling, Striving, Marginalized, and Reluctant to Thriving

What strategies did you use to make sense of your reading of this text, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States? What caused you to slow down or reread? Under what circumstances might a teacher introduce this document to students even those thought to be struggling with reading? What challenges might young people representing an array of reading abilities encounter as they read? How could a teacher help those young people to address any challenges and weigh the text's possible meanings? What knowledge and strategies might young people extrapolate from this experience to other reading? The purpose of our commentary is to invite you to confront with us the travesty that typically passes for literacy instruction for older youth in the United States who struggle with reading. In too many U.S. schools, these young people face an impoverished curriculum, receiving literacy instruction that is ill suited to their needs, or worse, receiving no literacy instruction at all. We invite you to consider, in contrast, teaching that helps young people to read a wide range of texts more effectively, including the text with which we began this article. As important, we ask you to reimagine instruction that acknowledges such young people and that helps them to acknowledge themselves, as thriving, literate, intelligent human beings with important contributions to make including interpreting the First Amendment. In this article we explain why we believe dramatic change is essential, we introduce you to one young man who struggles with reading but who has begun to thrive, and we consider the implications of his growing success for future policy, research, and classroom practice. 4